Excel Science Fiction Plot Generator

Science Fiction Plot Generator
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Description

This program was written by Jocelyn Paine, of j-paine.org and virtual-worlds.biz. It's a spreadsheet that generates random plots for SF stories. It uses no VBA - pure Excel - although it does claim to have a macro in it when you open it...

Jocelyn's explanation of the program follows:

"It's based on a flow diagram I originally found in a 1970s SF anthology (and which I've heavily modified, having also used it in teaching elementary AI). It works by running round a plot network, which is stored in cells A210 onwards. Most of the nodes in the network have plot events leading from them to other nodes. The spreadsheet chooses an event at random, goes to the node it leads to, chooses another event, and so on until it hits a node with no events leading from it.

"I generated the spreadsheet from a program written for my Excelsior spreadsheet-generator. This probably made it a lot easier to code than if I'd worked directly in Excel. There's an explanation of how it works at http://www.j-paine.org/excelsior/repository/spin/index.html . One serious point of all this is that I'm experimenting with Excelsior and Literate Programming as a means of documenting large and complicated spreadsheets - the explanation is a small example of that."

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